I just went to set the Newly Registered Members' PM permissions to "never" but it was already set.
Hey, speaking of deleting members- I made a cool discovery while playing with copies of our database on my dev sites- a bunch of deleted users- including "elephantspike" and "smiles" can be restored using the Support Toolkit MOD. As long as the user's posts weren't deleted when the user was deleted, they can theoretically be restored. The problem is that the Support Toolkit won't work unless all our mods are uninstalled and all the core files restored to the un-modded out-of-the-box phpBB state and the style set to the default prosilver- WHich would make the board look like this:
So probably this is something we should do on a new Dev copy of the site on the new server in preparation for any conversions or upgrades or integrations we intend to roll-out. Really any of those processes will work better if the board is stripped-down raw and "unplugged" if you will, as shown above.